artisan

Seljak Brand was founded by sisters Karina and Samantha Seljak. It was a love of Australian resources that drew Karina home from her work in local food production in Brooklyn, New York. Trained in fashion design, she’d become acutely aware of the waste in the manufacturing world. Sam had worked at Indigenous creative agency Gilimbaa for several years and had started multiple community-driven initiatives in Brisbane. She was ready to crystallise her learnings from purpose-driven business into her own social enterprise, Seljak Brand. Inspired by the resourceful and mutually beneficial business practices Seljak Brand saw sprouting up all around them, they poured their time into understanding the circular economy and closed loop models. Seljak Brand’s respect for Australian wool lead them to the oldest weaving mill in Australia, which retains all of its production offcuts for future use. Using these offcuts to make blankets, they incorporated a closed loop system that re-manufactures the blankets at the end of their useable life. After working with Australia’s oldest wool mill for a few years, they started running out of waste – which is a good problem to have! But they wanted to divert even more textiles waste from landfill, so they looked overseas. Discovering a mill in Lithuania that collected its own factory floor waste, and processed the waste of other mills, they took their first step into globalising their supply chain. Today, Seljak Brand work with mills in Australia, Lithuania and Italy to make their recycled wool blankets. This enables them to work locally as much as possible, and tap into the scale that mills in Europe offer.